We keep on introducing Mike’s functions. This time there are a couple of Python methods that we haven’t seen here and need some introduction, izip and count. To use these two we also need to import new modules

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from itertools import count, izip

count returns consecutive integers starting at a defined point (the method’s parameter). If empty it starts from zero. Basically, by starting a count it will give an iterable with a increasing integer values, in a fashion similar to a function with yield. Every time our loop accesses the count it will “remember” the last return value and increment it by one. izip also returns an iterator, but from a list of iterables. It is basically used to iterate through a list of many iterables at the same time. In the function below it is used twice: one to generate a tuple (with count) with a sequence number and the sequence itself. The sequence in the tuple is then used in another izip to create the windows on the sequences to count motifs.

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def get_quorums_06(seqs, mlen):
    """
    add seq id_no to a set
    use 'izip(count(),...) to create seq_no
    use 'izip(count(),range(...)) to create start/stop indices for motifs
    """
    quorum = defaultdict(set)
    for id_no, seq in izip(count(), seqs):
        for s, e in izip(count(), range(mlen, len(seq))):
            quorum[seq[s:e]].add(id_no)
    return quorum

In the next couple of posts we still be checking motif quorum functions. Stay tuned.